Cover marketing activities from two to five years into the future. Except for firms such as autos, steel, or forest products, marketing plans rarely go beyond 5 years into the future.

Annual Marketing Plans:

Usually developed by a marketing or product manager in a consumer products firm, annual marketing plans deal with marketing goals and strategies for a product, product line, or entire firm for a single year.

Porter's Generic Business Strategies:

Identifies 4 basic "generic" strategies, that can be adopted by any firm, regardless of the product or industry involved, to achieve competitive advantage.

Involves 2 combinations:

1) Competitive Scope or breadth of the target markets

2) A stress on costs versus product differentiation.

Generic Business Strategy: Cost Leadership Strategy

Focuses on reducing expenses and, in turn, lowers product prices while targeting a broad array of market segments. The cost leader still must have adequate quality levels. Cost leadership strategy has resulted in lower prices for customers, causing its market share to increase in the current recession.

Generic Business Strategies: Differentiation Strategy

Requires products to have significant points of difference in product offerings, brand image, higher quality, advanced technology, r superior service to charge a higher price while targeting a broad array of market segments. This allows the firm to charge a price premium.

Generic Business Strategies: Cost Focus Strategy

Involves controlling expenses and, in turn, lowering product prices targeted at a narrow range of market segments. Retail chains targeting only a few market segments in a restricted group of products often use a cost focus strategy successfully.

Generic Business Strategies: Differentiation Focus Strategy

Requires products to have a significant points of difference to target one or only a few market segments.

Implementation Guidelines:

1. Communicate goals and the means of achieving them

2. Have a responsible program champion willing to act

3. Reward successful program implementation

4. Take Action and Avoid Paralysis by Analysis (tendency to excessively analyze the problem instead of taking action) Over come this "bias for action" and recommend a "do it, fix it, try it" approach.

Line Positions:

Have the authority and responsibility to issue orders to the people who report to them.

Directly involved in day-to-day ops of the organization, such as producing or selling a product/service. Line positions are occupied by line personnel and line managers. Line personnel carry out the primary activities of a business and are considered essential to the basic functioning of the organization.

Staff Positions:

Have the authority and responsibility to advise people in line positions but cannot issue direct orders to them. Serve the org. by indirectly supporting line functions. Consist of staff personnel and staff managers. Staff personnel use their technical expertise to assist line personnel and aid top management in various business activities. Staff managers provide support, advice, and knowledge to other individuals in the chain of command. ex. HR

Action Item List:

An aid to implementing a marketing plan consisting of 4 columns: 1) the task, 2) the person responsible for completing that task 3) the date to finish the task, and 4) what is to be delivered.

Functional Grouping:

Organizational groupings that represent the different departments or business activities within a firm.

Geographical Groupings:

Organizational groupings in which sales territories are subdivided according to geographical location.

Market Based Groupings:

Organizational groupings that use specific customer segments.

Marketing ROI:

The application of modern measurement technologies to understand, quantify, and optimize marketing spending.

Product Line Groupings:

Organizational groupings in which a unit is responsible for specific product offerings.

Sales Response Function:

Relates the expense of marketing effort to the marketing results obtained.

Share Points:

An analysis that uses percentage points of market share as the common basis of comparison to allocate marketing resources effectively for different product lines within the same firm.

Synergy Analysis:

Seeks opportunities by finding the optimum balance between marketing efficiencies versus research and development manufacturing efficiencies.